Word: valjean
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...Miserables is more sophisticated than the feelings it evokes, and infinitely more compelling than you can imagine a film derived from such a familiar source might be (there have been at least seven movie adaptations of it, not to mention an unstoppable stage musical). Lelouch understands that Jean Valjean and his friends, foes and milieu have long since permeated our consciousness, that you can't just uproot them, plunk them down unchanged in modern times and expect anyone to see the result as more than a gimmick...
What Lelouch does instead is divide Valjean in two, a father and son (both played by a wonderfully battered Jean-Paul Belmondo, whose son Paul plays the character in a transitional passage). Then he provides him with adventures that analogize, rather than slavishly imitate, those of his literary model. This figure, called Henri Fortin, is throughout aware of his resemblance to Hugo's original. He sees movie versions of the story, and people keep telling him that his physical strength, moral fortitude and frequent bad luck remind them of Valjean. He wouldn't know. He's illiterate, a retired boxing...
...Victor Hugo's 1500-page toms has a death grip on popular culture. It is the great international cry-fest, the teariest tear-jerker of them all. Its every laugh is tempered with reminders of the pre-revolutionary tribulations of France's lowest classes; and the jubilation of Valjean's victory over his past is mitigated by the despair of the students' doomed rebellion...
Solo leads the company, adding softness and sensitivity to Valjean's nominal roles as protagonist and patriarch. When Javert (Richard Kinsey) damns Valjean for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his family, the audience experiences Valjean's sense of injustice at his 19-year labor sentence, and lives his hope upon his parole. When Valjean protests his martyrdom while Javert blindly upholds his self-righteous resolution for law and order, we know that this will be an epic struggle...
Jacquelyn Piro--Cosette during the musical's 1988 Broadway run--brings a delicate urgency to Fantine's struggle for survival. Fired from her job in a factory owned by Valjean, now Monsieur Madeleine, the town's mayor and benefactor, she fears for the survival of her daughter Cosette, kept by an innkeeper in the French countryside. Piro delivers one of the most touching and powerful performances of the evening, "I Dreamed a Dream," as she recalls the only summer she spent with her child's father...